if kids have to be orphaned by AIDS in particular to qualify for the big-hearted warm-fuzzied guilt-ridden hip-mama Western adoption program. Or can they just be any kids orphaned by the usual stuff going on in Africa -- wars, abandoned land mines, famine, genocide and lack of clean drinking water? If we were to be honest about what is actually causing death in Africa, perhaps there would be fewer deaths, and fewer orphans.

And where the heck does she get 12 million as a number? Melissa Fay Greene happens to be my favorite author, ever since "Praying for Sheetrock." I am deeply disillusioned that she never took the trouble to read the fine print on the figures from Africa, which always, if they are honest, use the word "estimate."

And by the way, what is "AIDS"? It's not very clearly defined, especially in Africa, which is, aside from being "estimated" all over the map, subject to a very different definition than American AIDS. We assume we got it from Africa. Who's to say Africa didn't get it from us? Whatever "it" is.

I knew as I watched the towers smoke, from my rooftop in Brooklyn, that, although this was the most truthful moment of my entire life--everything laid bare about the world, myself--already the spin machine was fitting it into a story to support every false impulse imaginable. The impulse to war. The impulse to look to corrupt authority for guidance. Of the emotions I remember feeling on that day and ever since, I think that is the most painful.

It's not just a feeling that has been affronted, though; it's the actual security of this country. All the actions taken since then, from destroying suspected Al-Qaeda villages in Afghanistan to torture to random checking of bags on the subway, seem more like shooting guns in the air than effective measures. I blame more than this mythological administration. Have we already forgotten the hysteria that caused people to stock up on antibiotics and, later, duct tape?

Duct tape is not a rational response to the nuclear threat. Neither is standing on a pile of rubble with a megaphone, acting like a drunk, belligerent weasel in a barroom brawl. Inspired statesmanship, defusing tensions worldwide rather than heightening them, averting unnecessary wars, and deconstructing the myths and illusions that keep us in this pattern would make more sense.

Similarly, revising the history of 9/11 will never serve us. Like travelers following a false map, one that represents our mythologies more than the realities we must respond to, we are lost.

He lives in all of us . . .

OK, enough of the cornball stuff, but he does indeed live in me. The Mike Douglas Show educated me on American culture more than anything before or since. Catching it after school in the '70s because, well, our choices were limited back then, I remember:

A tiny Tiger Woods putting with Bob Hope, and Alice Cooper putting with Spiro Agnew;

Ruth Gordon complimenting Patti Smith on her originality;

Hearing ABBA and the Pointer Sisters for the first time;

Bizarre comments from Anita Bryant, who was just beginning her crusade against gays;

and assorted other memories that surface from time to time.

You just don't get that on Letterman.

God bless Mike Douglas. He explained it all for you, and helped you remember that it didn't matter who was right or wrong, cool or straight, or from whatever generation -- only that civility ruled. I feel truly sorry for the kids and younger adults of today, who have never experienced that.

. . . it's the humor. Keeping society stratified, organized, together. United We Stand. Tommy Chong crossed that line, and hats off to him for staying there. In totalitarianism, the first people sent away are the clowns.

Thanks to Tommy Chong for his thoughts on "legalization." I never thought about it that way before. I hate cigarette smoke. I hate it on a beautiful, fresh summer day when I'm walking to work, and I hate it in restaurants, bars and sidewalk cafes. I just plain hate it. So I'm absolutely sure I don't want to get a contact high from the street. I know it would take more than a whiff of the stuff, but at certain places, legalization (which I otherwise support) might bring a no-limits kind of thinking.

How about a pot-smoking section of each public park, downwind from the straights? And big signs in public saying, "No Smoking . . . of any kind." Even by Tommy Chong.